Bargain Basement ~ 1952; Early TV Home Shopping

more at http://quickfound.net/

Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_shopping

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Home shopping is the electronic retailing and home shopping channels industry, which includes such billion dollar television-based and e-commerce companies as Shop LC, HSN, Gemporia, TJC, QVC, eBay, ShopHQ, Buy.com and Amazon.com, as well as traditional mail order and brick and mortar retailers as Hammacher Schlemmer and Sears, Roebuck and Co. Home shopping allows consumers to shop for goods from the privacy of their own home, as opposed to traditional shopping, which requires one to visit brick and mortar stores and shopping malls.

There are three main types of home shopping: mail or telephone ordering from catalogs; telephone ordering in response to advertisements in print and electronic media (such as periodicals, TV and radio); and online shopping...

The possibility for merchants to show their goods through the world was the first usage of the "electroscope" (some kind of television apparatus) imagined by the author of the hoax published in the New York Sun, 30 March 1877. First experiments appears in UK as soon as 1934...

http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/United_States_Camera

The United States Camera Corporation was based in 17 North Loomis Street, Chicago 7, Illinois (U.S.A.) . It was apparently an alternate name of the Pho-Tak Corporation, at the same address...

http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/USC_Reflex_III

The Reflex III is a pseudo TLR made by the United States Camera company (17 North Loomis Street, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A). It is primarily made of plastic and features a fixed aperture and shutter speed with a plastic positive meniscus lens.

Design

The Reflex III uses 620 roll film and resembles a twin lens reflex camera. On top, a cover can be tilted up and forward to reveal the viewfinder: the photographer looks down into this to compose the photograph. The camera is made out of plastic but features a metal hotshoe on the left that could accept a matching flash unit. The flash is powered by two AA batteries which are loaded through a cover on the lower right side of the camera...